I whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.

I am seriously considering buying myself an erg. There are two craptastic ones at my gym, and I haven’t rowed on a nice one in so long that I have almost forgetten how tremendously painful it is. We have plenty of room on the back patio for it. And I’m not exactly going to lose any weight by wishing on a star in ‘09. </thinking out loud>

Just around the corner from Spago in Beverly Hills is a terrific little establishment named E. Baldi. (It’s the sister restaurant of just about the best place to eat in Los Angeles, Giorgio Baldi.) I had the amazing garganelle with meat sauce tonight, and didn’t realize until I was walking out the door that I had spent the last hour sitting about five feet away from Leonardo DiCaprio. He was wearing a Red Sox cap and I almost stopped to tell him I thought it sucked that he didn’t get an Oscar for The Departed. But this is LA.

I have no idea what possessed me to go see The Day the Earth Stood Still on Saturday night. The ads didn’t really impress me, but I saw that it featured Coach Taylor, Dom Draper, and Archie Leach, so how bad could it be?

Let me put it this way: The absolute best part of the movie was something that happened five minutes after the credits rolled. I was in the men’s restroom and inexplicably heard Alvin & The Chipmunks doing a cover of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the theater’s stereo system. I think that says it all.

I couldn’t find one anywhere at Yahoo! Sports or on ESPN, so I did some hacking and put together an iCal version of the 2008-2009 College Football Bowl Schedule. You should be able to click that link to “subscribe” to the calendar, which will add all 34 of this season’s bowl games to your iCal or Outlook calendar.
[click to continue...]

I am astounded by how bad the J.Crew website is. The .jsp filenames indicate that the site is Java. It is tragically slow and the senseless implementation of AJAX makes it near impossible to use. It’s almost 2009! How can there be so many horrible shopping cart systems on the ‘net? And for such a large company … it’s embarrassing.

The Killers’ awesome cover of one of my favorite Dire Straits tracks — Romeo and Juliet — is more than enough of a reason to buy Sawdust. There are 17 b-sides and otherwise unreleased covers and studio versions on this excellent collection. I grabbed it from iTunes about a month ago and have been loving it.

My little sister is recording the event while mountain climbing somewhere in Oregon, so she asked me not to SMS her any information about the SEC Championship Game. Intentionally planning something of any importance — a mountain expedition, a wedding, bachelor party, childbirth, etc. — on a Saturday in the late Fall (or early Winter) is mind-boggling to me. My uncle — whose wife’s birthday is today, actually — got married on the day of the Super Bowl. (It was even worse that his favorite team was the AFC champion that year.) Priorities, people.

For some reason that makes little sense, Apple decided to not include one of the words I use most frequently in the iPhone’s internal dictionary. So if I ever send you a text message saying that something is, “ducking awesome,” or that you need to, “get the duck out,” that is why. A certified Apple Genius™ sent me this ducking brilliant solution: Ducking an iPhone Annoyance

To Coors’ horror, Zima proved most popular among young women — a demographic that, while generally fond of getting tanked, just doesn’t have the same thirst for hooch as its male counterpart. And once the ladies took a shine to the stuff, the guys avoided Zima as if it were laced with estrogen.

from The Long, Slow, Torturous Death of Zima

I love Twitter. I joined when I was at SXSW2006 and forgot all about it until about six months ago. I’ve been enjoying it tremendously lately. Just today I finally convinced Kelly to install Twitterific. And now … Shaquille O’Neal is posting tweets.

If you want to connect your XBOX 360 to your home’s wireless network, you could spend about $85 on an official XBOX 360 Wireless Network Adapter. But that will only get you one network port. I’ve got DirecTV and have been meaning to connect that to the network, too, so I can access the OnDemand system.

I made a trip to the Best Buy on Sawtelle and Pico, where the employees — even the Geek Squad “experts” — were, as usual, absolutely and pathetically useless. But I didn’t let that stop me.

[click to continue...]

Want to change your Dock icons in Mac OS X? It’s pretty simple, if not obvious. Here’s how:

1. Find the icon you want to use and copy it (Cmd+C).
2. Find the application for which you want to use this new icon in Finder’s “Application” folder.
3. Right-click the application and choose “Get Info”.
4. Select the existing application icon in the top left corner of the “Get Info” pop-up window by single-clicking it.
5. Paste your new icon (Cmd+V) over it.

If the application you chose is in your Dock, you might have to restart the Dock to get your new icon to appear. To do that, open Terminal and type: “killall -KILL Dock” (without the quotes). Your Dock should immediately restart. Click the application and your new icon will appear.

[click to continue...]

Alexander McPherson, a professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at UC Irvine’s school of biological sciences, wrote a bitchin’ letter to the LA Times on the subject of sexual harassment training. This is a must-read for anyone that has a brain.

As far as I can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed to relieve the university of liability in the case of lawsuits.

Awesome news from Jason: You can now watch every episode of Arrested Development online, for free, at Hulu.com! We just started watching this brilliantly funny show this summer. I’m only up to about the middle of season two, and am seriously looking forward to the rest.